Select your database from the list (tiki19 in this example; tiki_1 in screenshot below), at the drop down from the left column of the screen. You will see then something like:

Click on the tab that says SQL (or Export, in newer versions of phpMyAdmin):

At the export screen, make sure that you check the box from the section “Structure”, that says “Add DROP TABLE”, since it will be much easier the process to re-insert a backup later on from this same database that you are now exporting.

The rest of options are ok as seen by default.

At last, select the box “send”, and click on the button “Execute”. You will see a dialog menu like this one:

Save it on disc at your preferred location.

We will now open it to check that everything is all right (and to let you show the type of file saved, if this is new to you):

The file has to be encoded in utf-8. If we want to change the character set to, for instance, iso-8859-1 (to be able to edit it with most MS Windows applications that didn’t cope well with other charsets different from that default), we can do it direcetly from true “utf-8 enabled” editors (see ToolBox pages for links on common applications to do that depending on your operating system). For instance, using KWrite, on GNU/Linux, it would look like:

C. Backing up with console.php at a terminal screen

Basic command (this will make a date and timestamped gzipped dump of the database in /path/to/backups/)

php console.php database:backup /path/to/backups/

Format the backup file name, this example will only use the year, month and day in the output file name.

php console.php database:backup /path/to/backups/ Y-m-d

Add a cron command to do this to create an hourly backup which will overwrite yesterday’s ones 24 hours later

E. phpMyBackupPro

I installed phpMyBackupPro v.1.8 http://www.phpmybackuppro.net and modded 1 line of tiki-login: including a call of the scheduled backup script of pMBP. Now I get my daily gzipped backup of the Database delivered right into my mailbox.

phpMyBackupPro has also a feature for directory backup per FTP; I’ve not yet tried it for attachment and gallery folders located outside of www root.

I included the backup feature into the Login script because only logged users can post on my site - thus the script is only called once for every user, and performance is only slightly affected by the first user each new day who triggers the daily backup (has to wait some seconds until the backup is finished). If nobody logs in there’s no need to update the last backup.

F. MySQLDumper

MySQLDumper is a PHP and Perl based tool for backing up MySQL databases. You can easily dump your data into a backup file and - if needed - restore it. It is especially suited for shared hosting webspaces, where you don’t have shell access. MySQLDumper is an open source project and released under the GNU-license.
The problem: A PHP script has a maximum execution time that is usually set to 30 seconds on most server installations. A script running longer than this limit will simply stop working. This behavior makes backing up large databases impossible. Maybe you already had this specific problem when using other tools. MySQLDumper fills a gap …

MySQLDumper uses a proprietary technique to avoid this problem. It only reads and saves a certain amount of data, then calls itself recursively via JavaScript and remembers how far in the backup process it was. The script then resumes backing up from that point.

The restore process is similar. Unlike other tools, splitting and splicing of large backup files is no longer necessary.

MySQLDumper can write the data directly into a compressed .gz file. The restore script is able to read this file directly without unpacking it. You can also use the script without compression, but using Gzip saves a lot of bandwidth. You can even configure the script to automatically send the backup file to an FTP account or your email address.
Get it on http://www.mysqldumper.net/.

G. HeidiSQL

HeidiSQL is a graphical and easy to use interface to your SQL database. You can define connections in the server manager. Dump selected databases and data into a single dump file, one file per table, directly to another host, to clipboard or to another database on the same server.Get it on http://www.heidisql.com.

Related links

Importing the database again

In order to restore the database you have in a backup, you have to import it to you MySQL server. See Import database for more details.